Ivy by William Dickstein

Author:William Dickstein [Dickstein, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781070307961
Published: 2019-07-24T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5—LOCHLAN’S DISCOVERY

Lochlan’s mood module was running hot, the skin around the tiny device so high in temperature that his sweat was starting to sizzle. The huge printer in the middle of the room hadn’t just been turning scrap metal into humanoid machines–it had turned scrap metal into humanoid machines that could put themselves back together.

While The Control made sure Agents were strong enough to easily crush their assailants, and that they had the endurance of many men, it simply wasn’t enough to just break the robots or rip them apart. Every time Lochlan pulled a limb free of a torso, the limb began to slowly reach and pull its way back until it could maneuver itself to line its end back into the joint, where it reconnected instantly. The Agents had been busy trying to find a way out through the door they had entered, after the metal had dropped down from the top of the door frame, and in that time dozens of the broken robots had already put themselves back together. A roaming arm had grabbed Lochlan’s ankle as the start of the battle, and when his attention had been drawn to his feet, two other robots with no arms slammed themselves hard into the younger Agent, the three forms crashing against the wall. Lochlan hit his head against the dense metal of the warehouse, his vision blurring as his eyes shifted slightly in his head. He tore the heads of the two robots clean off as he stood up, but was immediately met with another three attempting the same maneuver. Lochlan’s enhanced legs carried him high over the three rushing robots with a quick jump, the Agent landing feet first to crush another two heads.

This pattern continued for some time before Lochlan and Khard eventually realized that it was going to take more than crushing the robots to keep them down. It was Khard who began to use his modifications first, an action Lochlan heard more than he saw due to the dense crowd of robots around them. Lochlan picked up the body of a robot by its ankle and swung it around him in a circle to clear some room, needing a moment of preparation to activate the modification he thought might work best. As he cleared an area for himself, Lochlan bent down to touch two points behind each ankle, and then one more point in the middle of his chest as he stood back up, wondering not for the first time why he’d never bothered to design his modifications so he could activate them on a whim without having to touch various parts of himself.

Lochlan’s right hand stuck itself so that his palm was facing outward, and one by one each of his fingers began to drop and sink down into itself until his arm ended with only his palm. Then Lochlan’s palm flipped open, splitting in the middle horizontally to reveal a device that looked like a halogen light bulb with an opaque cover on top.

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